CHAPTER VII

Summary

Beginning of the renascence.

The fourteenth century put an end to the Middle Ages and shook to the foundations their institutions, which had hitherto endured in their narrow and dogmatic form : the ancient Church, the ancient empire, the feudal monarchy, the communal polity, the scholastic methods of learning. Released from the bonds of caste, of party, and of the scholastic system of thought, man appeared as a personality. He also rent the mystic veil of faith. The powers to which in blind piety he had hitherto rendered submission, he now surveyed with frank and critical gaze. He investigated their origin and their history; he removed them from their mythic spheres to human circumstances, and judged them according to their historic value. The fourteenth century profaned the mediaeval authority of the emperor as that of the pope. While man averted his thoughts from a world beyond, he boldly turned back to the past, in order to supplement with the classic ideal the system of Christianity, which had sought to educate him solely for heaven. He began to worship the heroes, the poets, the philosophers of Pagan antiquity with the same enthusiastic reverence that he had formerly accorded to the martyrs, apostles, and Fathers of the Church. He revived the forgotten culture of Hellas and Rome; restored the interrupted connection with the ancient world, and impartially accepted the Pagan spirit in his scheme of culture.